Writes Jack Shafer in Slate:Al-Qaqaa Reconsidered - The competition throws stones at the New York Times scoop

That there are two sides to every story is not something that would automatically occur to the man who reads only one newspaper. If you’ve followed the Al-Qaqaa news only in the New York Times, where it broke, you might believe that the United States committed an unspeakable blunder in failing to guard the 380 tons of high explosives it knew Saddam harbored in the Al-Qaqaa weapons complex. The Times’ Oct. 25 scoop and its Oct. 27 and Oct. 29 follow-ups give that impression. But if you’ve consumed the Washington Post alongside the Times, your certainty about an American miscue would have evaporated by now. The Post’s Oct. 27 catch-up piece and its Oct. 29, Page One naysayer, “Munitions Issue Dwarfs the Big Picture,” portray the missing munitions as an overplayed story.

Journalists live to knock down what their competitors write: Nobody at the Gazette ever made his mark by re-reporting and confirming what the Bugle published. But the Post isn’t zigging on the Al-Qaqaa story simply because the Times zagged. It’s whittling away at the Times account, as I noted earlier this week, because the Times scoop raises questions about Al-Qaqaa that Times editors should have answered before they sent the scoop to print.

The bottom line:

always remember to read more than one newspaper a day.

Indeed.